Thank you so much. Thank you all for coming. It’s a great pleasure for me to be here with all of you.

I want to give special thanks to the Rabbi and Laya, who have made this day possible. Also, special mention goes to Steven Douglas, our fellow congregant who couldn’t be here today. Without Steven's help I would not have been able to produce the excellent maps which are in this book.

First, a little about me. Please check my website, richardsacks.com, for background on me and the book and for pictures of Africa.

I have had a long career with the State Department Foreign Service. Starting in 1989 I was posted with my family to six countries in Asia, North Africa, and Latin America. And I held a bunch of increasingly important jobs in Washington. I have two graduate degrees — one from Johns Hopkins University in international relations and international economics and one from National War College in national security strategy. In 1991 I published a book about Paraguay, a country in South America. I worked several years in the newspaper business as a reporter in Massachusetts and Michigan. I also worked in construction in the US and in Africa, where I learned to be a surveyor.

But the reason I’m here today is to tell you about my new book, DRINKING FROM THE STREAM, what it’s about, how it was written, and why you might want to read it. And I’m going to read a tiny part of the book for you.

STREAM is a novel. It’s fiction. It’s a made up story. The plot and the characters are imaginary. But it’s a novel that keeps close to the historical facts. And it’s about a time and a place — or places — that I’m very familiar with. It’s set in the early 1970s, a time of upheaval when the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Vietnam War marked a generation.

STREAM is historical fiction. But it’s also a political thriller. And it’s an action-adventure novel. The story leapfrogs ten countries from Louisiana and the United States to Europe and to Ethiopia and East Africa.

STREAM is meant to be a serious book. It’s about friendship. And long-distance travel. And politics and history. It’s about youth. A generation coming of age. But it's also about racial hatred. It’s about people killing defenseless people. STREAM is not about war. It’s about revolution and revolt. It’s about massacre and mass murder. 

I think we don’t like massacres. I think we’re all against massacres and mass killing. But it is so common. And mankind can’t seem to stop doing it. It’s just that mass killing is so useful for political ambition. To eliminate your enemies, to provoke fear, and to control populations. It happens constantly, all around the world, and has happened, often, in our country, the United States. 

The Holocaust was a massacre, maybe a long series of massacres, maybe the world’s biggest massacre. 

You may be wondering about the novel’s title: DRINKING FROM THE STREAM. The novel’s name, DRINKING FROM THE STREAM, comes from Psalm 110, which is part of the weekly Jewish sabbath service. 

In a passage that contains some of the Bible's most violent imagery, Psalm 110 says, speaking of the Lord:

He will render judgment upon the nations, and they will be filled with corpses;

He will crush heads over a vast land.

He will drink from the stream on the way, and so will hold his head high.

STREAM is about international youth hitchhiking rather aimlessly around East Africa who run smack into revolt, revolution, and insurrection. Think ON THE ROAD meets Idi Amin.

Here’s a short capsule of the plot: Jake Ries, a twenty-two-year-old Nebraska farm boy turned oil roughneck, turns fugitive when he unintentionally kills a homicidal White supremacist on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico, who mistakes him for a Jew. In an argument about money he tries to kill Jake. Instead, Jake kills him. On the run, Jake meets Karl Appel, a restless Oxford dropout and former anti-war activist from Cincinnati struggling with his own personal demons. Together they throw caution to the wind and plunge into the Ethiopian and East African hinterland, where they discover that dictatorship and mass murder are facts of life. And along the way they meet Howard Chapman, a brainy English South African, who teaches at the Sorbonne in Paris; Beatrice Bergmann, a brilliant German law student, a Berlin street fighter fleeing the post-war West German legal profession which is still infested with former Nazis, and also trying to get away from her family and her violent radical friends. Then there's a frustrated, panicky Ugandan, a former medical student nicknamed Swee’Pea who is desperate to escape Uganda and her rapacious Ugandan military officer uncle. Horrified by the racism and injustice of their own societies, these idealistic young people, these political outcasts, watch the same threats play out before their very eyes as they travel around East Africa.

Mainly STREAM is about what was going on in East and Central Africa in the early 1970s and how it shapes the lives of these young people who encounter it. 

So how, you may ask, am I qualified to write a book about Africa? 

Well, let me tell you. It all started when I got out of college. I was twenty-one years old. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do.

I had a couple of thousand dollars in the bank saved from shoveling snow, lawn mowing, and various summer jobs. That was a lot more money than it is today. So I headed for Europe that summer and vowed to live very frugally to make my money last as long as possible. 

But after the summer ended I didn’t go home. I kept going. I stayed on the road. I had a friend, David, who also was at loose ends. We got together in Israel and found a cheap flight to Ethiopia. And that was the start of my African adventures. It was 1972. And I didn’t return home until four years later.

Now what was Africa like as we found it at the start of 1972?

After independence, which came around 1960, East Africa was unstable and very poor. Self-government was novel and untested. The colonial powers had herded hundreds of unrelated ethnic groups into made-up countries with nonsense borders and kept society and social change in a deep freeze for close to a century. And they never invested much in those countries. Almost everywhere after independence there were political assassinations, massacres, tides of refugees, and military coups. This region experienced a level of mayhem that few Westerners understood or can now remember.

Look, mass killing in Uganda was already in full swing in March 1972 when David and I arrived. A year earlier in 1971 General Idi Amin had overthrown President Milton Obote. Yet Amin could not rule Uganda without the guns of his soldiers. Amin feared anyone, military or civilian, who might still be loyal to Obote. He killed as many Obote supporters as he could. The killings started within the army and quickly grew to tens of thousands.

Now fast forward to May 1972. In May 1972 I was sitting in a student cafeteria in Angola at the University of Luanda reading the International Herald Tribune. I had just hitchhiked through Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Zaire, and I had just reached Angola, which was then a Portuguese colony. What caught my eye in the Herald Trib that morning was an article about ethnic killings in Burundi. Burundi? I had passed very close to Burundi. I had been less than fifty miles from Burundi. I had thought of going to Burundi. The article described a bloody uprising in April 1972 when Hutu rebels had used pangas — machetes — to kill hundreds of unsuspecting Tutsi citizens with the idea of sparking a civil war. 

But even more shocking the article described the slaughters by the Burundi army that followed. The Tutsi-led army countered the Hutu death squads with a much bigger, much better organized ethnic bloodletting of their own, killing Hutus, especially educated Hutus. Specifically they aimed to eliminate any Hutu who had completed the fourth grade. That’s because the Burundi authorities suspected that the leaders of the revolt had been unemployed Hutu schoolteachers who could not find a job in Tutsi-ruled Burundi. Their solution to the problem of educated Hutus who could not find a job in Tutsi-dominated Burundi was to kill the . All of them. By May 1972 this had become a death sentence for any Hutu who had passed the fourth grade in Burundi. Tens of thousands were already dead by that morning when I was in Angola reading the Herald Trib. The killings were gathering momentum with no end in sight. As we now know, by 1973 well over 200,000 Hutus had been murdered.

Sometimes great events touch us deeply. How could so many people be murdered so quickly, I wondered? More importantly, why was the world ignoring it? And why and how did it come about? What if I had decided, as was entirely possible, to visit Burundi myself? And if I had, I would have been there exactly when the killings broke out. What then? 

The entire African continent seemed to be on a bloody run. A year or two back, around 1970 peace had been restored to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, after ten years of mayhem and revolt. Besides the killings in Uganda, mass killings of Tutsis had become commonplace in Rwanda since 1959, since even before independence. And all of southern Africa, not just Angola, was in revolt against white minority rule. 

Now fast forward again to 1976, when I returned from my travels. As you might have guessed I wound up living with mom and dad. My mother, to whom this book is dedicated, constantly pestered me with the question, “What did you actually do in Africa?” I badly wanted to write about my travels to tell the world what I had seen. But what kind of book should it be? I had spent three years in Africa, traveling and working. I had crossed the Sahara. II had traipsed across the continent three times from one end to the other by road. I had lived in, worked in, or visited twenty African countries. 

I obviously had a huge amount of material but I didn’t want to produce simply a series of anecdotes about myself. I felt sure writing a novel would have the greatest possible impact. And the role that race and racial hatred was playing in Africa, which I had witnessed at close hand, continued to amaze me. I wanted to knock the world on its ear. 

Into the stew in my mind were the anti-Semitic zealots I had encountered at my construction jobs. They didn’t care who they told about their deranged plots and conspiracies. And they sometimes even tried to recruit me to their cause, not realizing that I was Jewish. This Jew-hatred was surprisingly widespread, if marginal, but it struck me as of the same coin as what I had seen going on in Africa. Selling hatred of the Other as a path to power. And what if one of those fanatics stupidly mistook a non-Jew for a Jew as the object of their hatred and then tried to kill him? That thought was the inspiration for Jake Ries.

I poured it out on a typewriter, as fast as I could the summer after I returned home. 

I have to tell you, it’s great fun to write fiction, at least at first. At the end of a few hours of work every day I had four or five new manuscript pages filled with characters I had made up with their own histories — or backstories as we call them — in situations I had created pursuing paths and plot lines that could go literally anywhere. Day after day I worked at it. 

Now hold on just a minute. It is great fun writing a book at warp speed, all right, but pretty soon you have to deal with a growing pile of pages that, while they may be filled with your great ideas and inspirations and creativity and emotions and literary talent, hopefully, they still need a lot of discipline and a big amount of tough love. That pile of pages is not yet a novel yet, not even a story, really. It’s more like a fascinating mess that you have to go back to and hammer into a story. And that’s the really hard part.

After I wrote several hundred pages I started to slow down. Life had other things in mind for me. The manuscript went into a drawer, then into a box that I shlepped around the world for decades after I joined the Foreign Service. As time passed it got harder and harder to start writing again. But a few years ago I finally dug it out again. Dusted it off. I wanted to get it done. Finally. And I started to work on the manuscript again every day after work.

What emerged was the manuscript of DRINKING FROM THE STREAM. 

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I suppose I should say a few words about the so-called creative process. Writing a book is a huge undertaking. It’s a lot of work just getting the words down on paper. But don’t think that when you complete the manuscript and write “The End” that you’re done. Far from it! The manuscript is still a mess. Now you’ve got to edit it. DRINKING FROM THE STREAM went through at least seven re-writes. 

Just to give an example, let’s consider the length of the book. DRINKING FROM THE STREAM as published in March 2025 was 326 pages. But a book’s length is measured in words, not pages. STREAM  is a lean 93,000 words. But the first draft was over 125,000 words. That means it was bloated. I had to cut out one-third of the original manuscript. And it’s hard to know what to cut. Cutting is painful. We authors get attached to the words we put on the page. But more is not always better.

There are a million things to keep in mind when editing a manuscript. Are there repetitions? Misspellings? Have you left things out? Will it all make sense to a reader? Are the historical facts correct? Are they in the proper order? Is the writing strong? How could it be stronger? More importantly, is it engaging? Will readers want to keep turning the pages?

And here are more puzzles. Are the characters strong and consistent? Do they sound different from each other? A novel is basically a collection of scenes. But are the scenes sharply drawn? Are they as short as you can make them?

Now, while I was worrying about all that, I had to find people to read the manuscript. That's for feedback. These are the so-called Beta readers. And their opinions are very important. They’re ordinary people, they’re not literary geniuses. You depend on them to tell you what they really think of the book and most importantly what they don't like about it. And feedback can be painful to listen to. But the author needs to hear it. And that’s not the end. A writer almost always needs a professional editor to critique the manuscript. And you have to pay someone to do that. DRINKING FROM THE STREAM went through three separate, professional edits.

All right. Now someone said that writing a first novel is like applying for a job that doesn’t exist I think you may be getting the idea that this book publishing business is a rather slow process. I’m going to leave out finding an agent. Finding a publisher. Going through the publishing and design process. More editing. More proof-reading. Pre-publication publicity. All of that is a bunch of major headaches. Very exciting but painful.

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OK. Before I read from the book I’d like to quote Mark Twain, who humorously summed up his feelings about book writing at the end of a book you’ve all heard of, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, where Huck says:

. . . and so there’s nothing more to write about, and I’m rotten glad of it, because if I’d ‘a’ knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t ‘a’ tackled it . . .